Meaghen Brown

You could smell the smoke from Fifty-ninth Street, but it wasn’t until fifteen-odd fire trucks were seen tearing up Park Avenue that Upper East Siders—many of them in their pajamas—started gathering at the police cordons around the Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun. Forty fire units and a hundred and seventy F.D.N.Y. were dispatched to battle the blaze that ripped through the hundred-and-ten-year-old synagogue late Monday night. According to a police spokesman, the synagogue has been under renovation since May 2nd, and for this reason no Torahs were in the building at the time.

On Wednesday, March 23rd, Tom Root and Andi Lloyd received word that their son, a twenty-one-year-old Middlebury college student named Tik Root, was missing in Syria—a parent’s nightmare. The State Department told them that it appeared that Root was being held in custody by the Syrian authorities. Though details are tenuous at best, it is thought that security forces rounded him up along with several other students who were observing, from the periphery, a protest at a mosque in Damascus’s Old City. That protest was a prelude to the violence in Syria yesterday and today, when security forces opened fire on protesters in several Syrian cities; as of Thursday, the death toll in the city of Daraa, according to Human Rights Watch, was already thirty-seven.